Година

A year has passed since the first secretary of our party, comrade Todor Zhivkov, delivered his programmatic speech "Communist ideology - the guiding principle of our literature and art". The main pathos of the speech was directed against bourgeois ideology and the channels of its penetration in our country. Its main meaning was to unite the ideological cadres for a more successful offensive against foreign ideological influence, for decisively overcoming deviations from Marxist-Leninist views and socialist realism in the field of culture and art.

In the vast literature on the life and work of Hristo Botev, there is no more comprehensive study of the impact that the genius of the Bulgarian nation has exerted for decades on the development of our literary and social thought. The question of Botev's participation in the ideological, political and literary struggles of other peoples has not been considered in a broader sense. Only a few popular articles, and most notably Minko Nikolov's study "Botev in the ideological and poetic path of Vazov", printed in 1956 in book two of the Botev-Levski Institute Bulletin, as well as the article "Hristo Botev in Serbian and Croatian literature", published in volume four of the Slavic Collection, 1963, examine individual moments of this so multifaceted and so vital impact. Zdenek Urban's study "The Activity and Creativity of Hristo Botev and the Czech Republic in the 1970s and 1980s" also has such a character, published in 1959 in book three of the Proceedings of the Botev-Levski Institute.

The epic narrative in Georgi Karaslavov's multi-volume epic "Ordinary People" has always reminded me of the mighty flow of a wide and deep river - calm and even, but hiding unsuspected depths within itself, spilling out into side branches that whimsically curve and rejoin in the main direction, covering ever larger and larger spaces, imperiously pushing towards its ultimate goal.